COS – Camberwell
Project was designed by Steve Taylor, Director COS Design, the clean, crisp landscape features sleek uncluttered lines and a restrained modern palette of colours and materials. The result is a series of open and airy spaces and a seamless interior-exterior transition.The materials used are of the highest quality and include custom-sized honed bluestone paving with drop-down coping and feature bluestone cobbles, all of which were supplied by Stone Hub. Bluestone is an enduring stone with impressive slip and scratch resistance, making it ideal for around pools and entertaining areas.
This project required to create a modern garden with a high aesthetic value from all internal vistas and the street frontage. Functionality was also of a high priority with entertaining friends and family being a regular event. The other tricky element was the home’s architecture didn’t match the modern pool house so were commissioned to create a palette that worked with both styles and somehow blended them together.
The urbane, pared back design of this contemporary landscape fits hand in glove with the minimalist architecture of the home and its distinctly modern interiors.
Every element within each outdoor space was chosen – and positioned – with great care. The Sphere sculpture from Lump Sculpture Studio, a contemporary creation of Corten and stainless steel, sits where it can be enjoyed from the pool house or when looking out from inside the home. Equal care was taken to make optimum use of the space in the parents’ courtyard, from the “floating” cantilevered timber bench to the Lump 3D Sahara water wall, also from Lump.
The planting scheme emphases interesting foliage and plants one normally associates with Asiatic style landscapes, adding to the feeling of tranquillity. There are feature plantings of Japanese maples (Acer palmatum ‘Senkaki’) and ornamental pears (Pyrus calleryana ‘Capital’) and the repeated use of bamboo. Three different varieties of bamboo, all supplied by Red Cloud Bamboo, were used. Slender weaver’s bamboo was used for architectural screening, Himalayan weeping bamboo for wispier screening and black bamboo in pots for height and to soften the hard edges of the built landscape. Completing the picture are groundcovers of black mondo grass and dwarf mondo grass.
